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As fact checkers busily highlight the myriad number of lies and distortions offered by Mitt-Etch-A-Sketch-Romney during last night’s debate, and the spinners spin their polls with impunity, I find it interesting that the debate tactic itself has not yet been discussed nor properly analyzed. In fact, the lies and distortions offered by Romney in last night’s debate are the very ESSENCE of his tactic — and is therefore quite pertinent to the discussion. Romney used a debate tactic known as the Gish Gallop.

The Urban Dictionary defines the Gish Gallop thusly:

Named for the debate tactic created by creationist shill Duane Gish, a Gish Gallop involves spewing so much bullshit in such a short span on that your opponent can’t address let alone counter all of it. To make matters worse a Gish Gallop will often have one or more ‘talking points’ that has a tiny core of truth to it, making the person rebutting it spend even more time debunking it in order to explain that, yes, it’s not totally false but the Galloper is distorting/misusing/misstating the actual situation. A true Gish Gallop generally has two traits.

1) The factual and logical content of the Gish Gallop is pure bullshit and anybody knowledgeable and informed on the subject would recognize it as such almost instantly. That is, the Gish Gallop is designed to appeal to and deceive precisely those sorts of people who are most in need of honest factual education.

2) The points are all ones that the Galloper either knows, or damn well should know, are totally bullshit. With the slimier users of the Gish Gallop, like Gish himself, its a near certainty that the points are chosen not just because the Galloper knows that they’re bullshit, but because the Galloper is deliberately trying to shovel as much bullshit into as small a space as possible in order to overwhelm his opponent with sheer volume and bamboozle any audience members with a facade of scholarly acumen and factual knowledge.

It is quite apparent to those of us who have closely followed this election, that this latest sketch drawn out by Romney completely contradicts major policy ideas stumped on the campaign trail by him over the last few months. Since Obama could no longer debate the substance (or lack thereof) of Romney”s policy ideas, it threw Obama off his game. We have seen Romney do this before in the primaries. Obama needs to be prepared for it in future debates. Call it Etch-A-Sketch, call it the Gish Gallop, call it lies…it’s all about the same. But it is a known debate tactic. And, like Romney, it is dishonest.

It appears that the Romney campaign has decided that it cannot win legitimately at this point. The Romney campaign website now sports an “Election Day Task Force” training page, with the goal to train people in the art of voter suppression through the time-honored tactic of racial profiling by poll challengers.

All across the right-wing blogosphere, the call has gone out to suppress the vote of minorities, of labor unions of anyone who does not believe in their candidate. One such call out has gone like so:

I want to turn as many of you as possible on to a massive task force the Romney campaign is putting together for election day. It’s called project “Orca”, where at least 20,000 (they’d love to get 30-40,000) volunteers camp out at polling places in swing states and feed real-time information to Boston using your smart phone, tablet, or whatever. I’ve been trained on this already, and it’s unreal what the Romney campaign is doing. Extremely sophisticated stuff that has real potential to make a sizable difference on election day. They are looking for even more volunteers, so if you’re interested, check out http://www.mittromney.com/orca.

I’m not giving anything secret away. At this point, the Romney campaign figures it’s too late for the Obama campaign to match this program.

For any Obama supporters that may be tempted to infiltrate the volunteer force, be aware that the Romney campaign will do a background check to make sure you are who you say you are. If you’ve “liked” anything supportive of Obama, for example, you’ll be found out.

The use of poll challengers is well established. The Democratic party uses them to prevent voter suppression in many states. The Republican party, however, has thrown its lot in with True the Vote and their goal of eliminating millions of eligible voters from the rolls through false claims of being dead, joining a long history of Republican voter suppression.

What is new this time, however, is the use of electronic devices to allow real-time analysis and coordination of the poll challengers. For instance, one can hang out in a parking lot, and when they see a car with an Obama sticker on it, they snap a picture of the person, forwarding it to the operative inside the polling station, who then does a direct and focused attack on the voting rights. In addition, the headquarters can find out in real-time how well the efforts are going, and know where to shift their efforts as the election goes on.

A report by the Brennan Center for Justice found that these voting suppression tactics are legal in just under half of the states, including several large states such as Michigan, Ohio and Illinois. And you find the call for poll challengers coming from these states. The Election Day Task Force is a highly coordinated and direct attack on the foundations of Democracy itself.

They begin training their voter suppression task force next week in Michigan.

Less than two weeks before an investment firm controlled by Mitt Romney decided to invest in a China-based home appliance company, the company put out a detailed document to investors promoting itself as a low-wage, low-tax firm that would not be subject to taxes in the United States.

It used “inexpensive labor,” Global-Tech Appliances wrote in a prospectus meant to attract investors on April 8, 1998. Its location in China meant “an overall effective tax rate that may be less than that of US corporations.” It said its current operations would not be subject to “material US taxes because it should not be considered to have significant income effectively connected with a trade or business in the US.”

The company also noted its working conditions: peak production periods required six-day work weeks, and two 10-hour shifts per day in the case of the metal stamping department. The main manufacturing facility, located in Dongguan, China, included 14 buildings that served as dormitories accommodating up to 3,700 workers.

Nine days after the document was released – on April 17, 1998 — an affiliate of Bain Capital called Brookside Capital Partners Fund acquired about 6 percent of Global Tech, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents that were first reported by Mother Jones magazine.

Romney was listed as the “sole shareholder, sole director, President and Chief Executive Officer of Brookside Inc. and thus is the controlling person of Brookside Inc.”

Republicans debuted a new ad Thursday in which a frustrated former Obama supporter expresses her disappointment with the president. The only problem: The woman in the video is actually an RNC staffer.

The new ad features Republican National Committee Director of Hispanic Outreach Bettina Inclan, who in the ad purports to be an average woman voter who supported Obama in 2008. She describes her disillusionment with the president in the ad as a romantic relationship gone awry.

“You’re just not he person I thought you were,” Inclan says in the ad, addressing a cardboard cutout of Obama. Inclan lists out-of-control spending and Obama’s penchant for hanging out with Hollywood celebrities as reasons for the break-up. “It’s not me, it’s you. I think we should just be friends.”

The ad asks people to share why they’re “breaking up” with Obama.

The RNC says its ad, which first appeared on television Thursday is not dishonest.

“It’s a lighthearted ad to show how millions of Americans feel about President Obama — he’s not the person we thought he was and it’s time to break up with him,” an RNC official told TPM. “But let’s be clear, it is an ad.”

Inclan began her current RNC post in January 2012, and has worked in Republican politics since well before Obama’s 2008 election. She did Hispanic outreach for Rick Scott’s 2010 Florida gubernatorial race worked on Capitol Hill for Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL), Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) and as national executive director of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly.

Since we are starting to learn more about how Mitt plans to spend all the money he’s received from those rich, secretive donors, what little we know of them – and what they want for their money – seems like a good place to start.

Not that anyone should be too surprised with Romney’s pandering to his base. In fact, there will be 7 birther speakers at the Republican National Convention, and Kansas Secretary of State, Kris Kobach – a known birther – is the immigration adviser to the Romney campaign:

There is no law anywhere that says collecting 10,000 signatures in each congressional district can have a candidate removed from the ballot. A whois search of the website mentioned in that ad tracked back to a long time GOP operative, big surprise. It may still, if they haven’t already covered their tracks (which one thinks they should have done before running the ad).

One more that worth checking out before it’s gone. Someone apparently filmed Mitt talking to some rich donors at a $50k per plate fund raiser on the “good” Bain was doing by using outsourced Chinese sweatshop labor:

LONDON, Aug 17 (Reuters) – Twice as many business executives around the world say the global economy will prosper better if incumbent U.S. president Barack Obama wins the next election than if his Republican challenger Mitt Romney does, a poll showed on Friday.

Democrat Obama was chosen by 42.7 percent in the 1,700 respondent poll, compared with 20.5 percent for Romney. The rest said “neither”.

This week marks the forty-seventh anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. A lot has changed since then. A new app called Election Protection was released yesterday that allows voters to register, find their polling locations, and report problems. Voters around the nation are already familiar with the Election Protection program, which has long fielded complaints from voters on Election Day. The increased used of smartphones, along with the increased move to suppress votes, makes the app a must-have this election season. Here are updates from some key states in which constituents are already worried about their vote.

As the presumptive GOP nominee, Mitt Romney is relying on a cadre of high-dollar and special-interest donors to fund his campaign. Giving information about his real policy intentions and high-level access for cash, Romney and Republicans are working hard to pull in as much money as they can from wealthy lobbyists, corporations, and PACs. But just who are the people that Romney has called on for campaign cash?

A closer look at Romney’s donors reveals a group of wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records. Quite a few have been on the wrong side of the law, others have made profits at the expense of so many Americans, and still others are donating to help ensure Romney puts beneficial policies in place for them. Here’s a look at just a few of the people Romney has relied on:

Donors who benefit from betting against America

Paul “Chip” Schorr: Paul Schorr has given $112,500 to Romney’s presidential ambitions through Super PAC and direct campaign donations. As a partner at Blackstone, Schorr closed a deal in 2007 to outsource the services of seven U.S. companies to a firm in India, boosting that firm’s profits by $220 million and making millionaires of the Indian management team. In 2006, he arranged a buyout of a Colorado travel reservations company that led to 841 layoffs while Blackstone and its partners recouped the billions of dollars they invested in less than a year.

Sam and Jeffrey Fox: Sam and Jeffrey Fox serve as co-chairman of Romney’s finance operation in Missouri and, together, have donated $220,000 to Romney’s presidential ambitions. They also control the Harbour Group investment firm which bragged about buying an automotive accessories manufacturing company in Kansas in 1997 and moving production to Mexico. In 2002, the Harbour group’s Mexico operation decided to outsource to China because China was “offering incentives and making it easy to open operations there.” The Chinese government awarded Sam Fox the Marco Polo Award for “his company’s role in China’s economic development and his humanitarian contributions to that country.”

T. Martin Fiorentino: T. Martin Fiorentino is on Romney’s Florida finance team and has bundled over $140,000 for the Romney campaign. He also lobbied on behalf of Lender Processing Services, a “foreclosure mill” that paid him to lobby on legislation aimed at preventing lenders from “making loans that borrowers would have difficulty repaying.” The government has reprimanded Lender Processing Services “for unsound practices related to residential mortgage loan serving and foreclosure processing.”

Special-interest donors

Romney’s stances on social and economic issues, like his long-standing alliance with Big Oil, attracts the contributions of high-dollar donors who are interested in pursuing a specific agenda. Here are just a few of special-interest donors that Romney is taking money from:

Louis Moore Bacon: An early mega-donor for Romney, Louis Moore Bacon donated $500,000 to the Restore Our Future Super PAC. Bacon makes his profit off of oil, first making a huge profit from successfully betting that gas prices would rise before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1989. Bacon’s firm, Moore Capital, was fined $25 million for attempting to manipulate certain commodity futures markets.

Thomas O’Malley: Thomas O’Malley is the CEO of PBF Energy, America’s fourth largest petroleum refining company, and gave $100,000 to Restore Our Future. Not only did PBF energy help drive gas prices up this year by curtailing gas production, but it spilled 6.6 million gallons of oil at a refinery in New Jersey. The release of toxic gas and eventual explosion at another of its refineries in Delaware also directly contributed to a spike in gas prices.

Kent Burton: Kent Burton is one of Romney’s new bundlers who raised more than $25,000 in one month for Romney’s campaign. He is also a registered lobbyist for a wide array of energy clients, including Marathon Oil and Shell Oil.

Frank Vandersloot: Frank Vandersloot is the national finance co-chairman of the Romney campaign and, through his company Melaleuca, has donated $1 million to Restore Our Future. He is also a “litigious, combative, and a bitter foe of the gay rights movement” who “spent big” on ads in an “ultimately unsuccessful effort to force Idaho Public Television to cancel a program that showed gays and lesbians in a favorable light to school children.”